[HOW-TO/TOOL]Extract Nandroid images on a PC - unyaffs

For a long time, I have struggled to find a solution to a very basic question. How do I extract the files/apps from my Nandroid Backups directly on my PC?
If you have been wondering about this too and haven't found a solution yet, this guide is for you!

Tool (See Attachment) : Unyaffs: Unyaffs is a program/binary to extract files from a yaffs file system image. Now it can only extract images created by mkyaffs2image. To know more head here (Do not download anything from there)

Steps:

1. Copy your Nandroid backup image file/s(Eg system.img or data.img etc) to a suitable folder on your PC. (Keep the original copy intact, just duplicate any/all image files that you want to extract)
2. Download the attachment and extract its contents (unyaffs.exe and cywin1.dll) to the same folder as your Nandroid image file/s.
3. Open a command window in that folder (Shift + Right Click -->> open command window here)

this is a very very useful tool... once my room mate forgot to manually backup some data and had only taken a cwm, then i searched and searched online and finally found this somewhere.. mounted the data on pc and then totally forgot about it.. thanks so much for posting it here buddy..

I had done this about a year back... had really forgotten about sharing it with you all.. i was very new to xda then..

this is a very very useful tool... once my room mate forgot to manually backup some data and had only taken a cwm, then i searched and searched online and finally found this somewhere.. mounted the data on pc and then totally forgot about it.. thanks so much for posting it here buddy..

I had done this about a year back... had really forgotten about sharing it with you all.. i was very new to xda then..

- ".img" and ".md5" files I get the message: broken image file
- ".tar" files I get: end of image, but no files in the folder (because the archives have 0KB, I guess)
- ".a" files I get the following:

My backup was made with CWM-Based Touch Recovery v6.0.1.2 (from SyiahKernel S2-v4.1.5).
Does anyone know if there is a way so I can extract a single file from this backup?

Thank you.

This will not work with newer recoveries because they use the newer ext4 filesystem for packaging/compressing instead of the older yaffs filesystem used by CWMv4. This will only work with yaffs filesystem recoveries. Only .android_secure.img, system.img, data.img, cache.img and hidden.img are supported. It cannot extract boot.img and recovery.img because these are not packaged/compressed by CWM. CWM just pulls these images from /dev/block and generates an md5 for them along with other packages. In short recovery and boot are not created by CWM, these are pre-compiled images and hence cannot be extracted using this tool.

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